ance,--that to which all
human beings are susceptible,--in which the soul has no share: for of
this kind of trance, and it was of this I spoke, some of the inferior
animals are susceptible; and, therefore, trance is no more a proof of
soul than is the clairvoyance of the mesmerists, or the dream of our
ordinary sleep, which last has been called a proof of soul, though any
man who has kept a dog must have observed that dogs dream as vividly as
we do. But in this trance there is an extraordinary cerebral activity, a
projectile force given to the mind, distinct from the soul, by which
it sends forth its own emanations to a distance in spite of material
obstacles, just as a flower, in an altered condition of atmosphere,
sends forth the particles of its aroma. This should not surprise you.
Your thought travels over land and sea in your waking state; thought,
too, can travel in trance, and in trance may acquire an intensified
force. There is, however, another kind of trance which is truly called
spiritual, a trance much more rare, and in which the soul entirely
supersedes the mere action of the mind."

"Stay!" said I; "you speak of the soul as something distinct from the
mind. What the soul may be, I cannot pretend to conjecture; but I cannot
separate it from the intelligence!"

"Can you not? A blow on the brain can destroy the intelligence! Do you
think it can destroy the soul?

'From Marlbro's eyes the tears of dotage flow,
And Swift expires, a driveller and a show.'

"Towards the close of his life even Kant's giant intellect left him.
Do you suppose that in these various archetypes of intellectual man
the soul was worn out by the years that loosened the strings, or made
tuneless the keys, of the perishing instrument on which the mind
must rely for all notes of its music? If you cannot distinguish the
operations of the mind from the essence of the soul, I know not by
what rational inductions you arrive at the conclusion that the soul is
imperishable."

I remained silent. Sir Philip fixed on me his dark eyes quietly and
searchingly, and, after a short pause, said,--

"Almost every known body in nature is susceptible of three several
states of existence,--the solid, the liquid, the aeriform. These
conditions depend on the quantity of heat they contain. The same object
at one moment may be liquid; at the next moment solid; at the next
aeriform. The water that flows before your gaze may stop consolidated
into ice